Winter
2005, Volume 22.2

Poetry

Myrna Stone

Myrna Stone's poems have recently appeared in Crab
Orchard Review, Nimrod, Barrow Street, River Styx, Black Warrior Review,
and Quarterly West. She has received Fellowships from the Ohio Arts
Council and Vermont Studio Center, and is the author of The Art of Loss,
a collection of poetry published by Michigan State University Press in 2001.

See other work by Myrna Stone published in Weber
Studies: 2002
poetry.

On the Occasion of Your Marriage

What are the young lovers? Two souls,
Which is to say a flowing and a flowing…
—Robert Pinsky

What else but two souls
and the intransigent freight of the heart
clarifying every moment of your isolation

until, in a single moment,
everything was changed: the season's
early pall of dusk, the bar's opaque,

smoky air, a curtain lifted,
and beyond it, revealed to you even then
as a kind of grace, your first glimpse

of the other. What else
but a flowing, in which you, my beloved
son, immerse yourself, the breadth

and depth of your spirit,
as your bride immerses her own, making
of yourselves and one another father,